'City Island' movie review: Overcooked family comedy

Emily Mortimer and Andy Garcia star in Anchor Bay Films' "City Island."A tiny floating satellite of the mainland Bronx, City Island is a place that requires a high tolerance for fried seafood, bad traffic and nautical kitsch.

“City Island” asks for even more forbearance.

City Island

(PG-13) Anchor Bay Films (100 min.)

Directed by Raymond De Felitta. With Andy Garcia, Julianna Margulies. Now playing in New York.

Stephen Whitty's rating: Two Stars

Rating note: The film contains sexual situations, strong language and brief violence.Crammed with “colorful” characters, the movie takes us inside a secretive family — a father (who wants to be an actor), a mother (who feels unloved), a daughter (who’s working as a stripper) and a teenage son (who gets a sexual thrill from watching obese women eat).

And then it drops another secret in their midst — the ex-con son that Daddy never knew he had.

This is incredibly overcrowded, even for a New York household, and it demands far too much of its audience.

We’re supposed to believe the father didn’t know he had a son — until the ne’er-do-well conveniently showed up as an inmate in the prison where he works as a guard? Or that, tossed out of college, the daughter then took a job at a strip club — right near her family home?

Doubtful.

Admittedly, there are some capable actors here, working very hard with very little.

Andy Garcia (who also helped produce) plays Vince the wannabe Brando, and he has one great scene as an amateur actor fumbling his way through an audition. (It’s the sort of scene good actors love to play.) And Julianna Margulies seems to enjoy trying out the angry spouse role she later took on in “The Good Wife.”

The cast also includes the always-appealing Emily Mortimer as a fellow acting student, and cranky Alan Arkin as a drama coach who goes on a tirade about the completely artificial, “natural” style.

They’re not enough, though, to compensate for the unappealing details. (The teenager’s fetish for chubby-chaser porn is particularly off-putting.) And the family itself is so unpleasant — every dinner is an explosion of thrown food and insults — the humor soon turns into horror.

Is it any surprise that Vince’s appalled new son soon asks to be sent back to prison?

Filmmaker Raymond De Felitta, who made the much better “Two Family House” a decade ago, clearly has an interest in blue-collar, outer-borough life. But “City Island” shows no evidence of what binds this family together, and no sense of its very specific setting.

How is life in this place different than life somewhere else? Does it enlarge this family’s experiences? Limit them? De Felitta, and his movie, have no idea. Instead he just keeps ladling on the shouted insults and freaky details — like a cook covering up yesterday’s fish with cheap red sauce.